Boots Ode
Whenever I lace these boots too tightly, the top of my right foot
goes numb, which prompts fear of diabetes, one of the scourges
lurking in my DNA. After Barrie switched to the lip of the pool,
wearing those cutoffs that revealed the bottommost two inches
of each front pocket, I gazed into those eyes black as mussel shells
for the last time & knew it, her soon to skinny-dip in the surf
off Key Largo & not in the secret spot we all knew in the Gale.
Once I reveal those were the years I owned one pair of boots
& the Converse low-tops I wore till the soles peeled away on Brattle Street
the hottest day of that year & me on my way with Tom or Leslie
or even Harvey (still wearing his Solzhenitsyn beard) to buy the first
of eight (so far) pairs of the sandals the Philistines ridicule
as their spines calcify for lack of chi, I’ll return to the present, an era
of post-industrial agony during which people like me—the few
I trust, anyway—research exile in Costa Rica now that the American Id
seems to have snapped its chains for good. I’m sick of living
in an empire even as I bless the two pair of insulated, waterproof boots
its amoral manufacturing practices make possible. Ah, but since
the past is always prelude, living well really is the best revenge & the ghosts
of Gauls indeed do cackle in the olive groves where Visigoths
feast on the roasted livers of the palace guard, I’ll revel in the week
my beat boots slouched in a corner of the attic where a winter
idyll unfurled inside Children of the Future & all the blues ever sung
south of Memphis. We ate, bathed & maintained ourselves otherwise,
but I don’t recall any of that & hope she doesn’t, either. Remember Son House?
Tampa Red? The invincible happiness of Boz Scaggs’ lead lines? Oh, yes:
A seven-day seizure of wordlessness, little deaths & rain drumming the roof.
Feral
When four Americans—white Americans, past-sixty childhood friends
become two couples, married couples with grown children, neighbors
across a frontier thick with topiary shrubs, repurposed bricks & wrought-iron
park benches—feud over feral cats, it makes you wonder why the pair
who’ve installed a feline-proportioned saloon door in their barn-wood
gazebo haven’t neutered the cats, or, if that’s too Homo sapiens-centric,
hired a metal-working artist from the hollowed-out cotton mill by the river
to fashion a maze serpentine, half-buried, punctuated with catnip-choked
dead-ends so the cats that do slip in & out for food & furtive licks
of a human toe or fingertip do so without shattering the eggshell
skulls of the pair who just want after what they’ve been through a week
or even a day without migraine, an evening with glasses of wine glowing
under the lamps illuminating the books they read & the profile each
can’t imagine glancing up & failing to see on the patio built during so many
Sundays chiseled from the granite of work & worry. Why pay any more
than you already have for what & how you want? It isn’t your fault so many
haven’t got where you’ve got & now you’ve got there, you’re back
in the school mud room, digging your fingers into the taut, pink neck
of the creature who’s stolen your pencil & won’t give it back.
Black the Jacket of Ivanhoe
Black the jacket of Ivanhoe,
black Rebecca the Jewess’ hair,
gray the dust on “Jewess,” chronic
the boy’s hunger as he reads
in the winter attic she heats,
heart & hearth of the tale, her skin
gleaming in the firelight knife-edge-clear
through the homemade telescope
mounted on an oaken tripod,
retort fuming on the dusky bench,
dun autumn air swelling with rain.
Knights & vassals, thieves crouched
in the trackless wood, orange moon
over the moat, trenchers heaped
with meat in the mead hall—
far he can see, nothing hidden,
the wait now ended for the cold
downpour that moves him to shroud
the lens with the square of sheet
dyed black for the purpose.
John Repp grew up near the Palace Depression in Vineland, New Jersey. His latest book is Fat Jersey Blues, published in 2014 by the University of Akron Press.